Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, who died on Tuesday aged 84, was a science fiction novelist who emerged as one of America’s greatest literary satirists and a guru of the counterculture during the 1970s; his best-known book, Slaughterhouse-Five, based on the Allied bombing of Dresden, became an anti-war classic ranked with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

“So it goes”, the laconic sentence which appeared, with Homeric regularity, after each mention of death in the book, embodied Vonnegut’s fatalistic shrug at the absurdities of life and death.

His cynicism about technology, environmental pollution, war and the apparent inability of Man to behave with common sense and decency brought him cult status with opponents of the Vietnam war, and with it invitations to speak at college campuses.

He also had the distinction of being one of the few American writers whose books were burned with official sanction (by a school board in North Dakota in 1973).

But as his brand of liberal humanism fell out of fashion, Vonnegut veered towards outright pessimism. “Let us be perfectly frank,” he wrote in Timequake (1997). “For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough.”

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But, although he took an overdose of barbiturates at the age of 61 and declared of his heavy consumption of unfiltered Pall Malls that it “was the only respectable way of committing suicide”, Vonnegut insisted that he was almost alone in wanting life to go on – though he admitted he could suggest little more than the advice given in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965): “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

In his last book, A Man Without a Country, he argued that “There is no reason good cannot triumph over evil, if only angels will get organised along the lines of the Mafia”.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr was born on November 11 1922 in Indianapolis, into a third-generation German-American family. He wanted to be a journalist, but his father, an architect, insisted he do something useful, so after Shortridge High School, young Kurt went to Cornell University at Ithaca, New York, to study Biochemistry.

After a year he moved to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology to study Mechanical Engineering, before enlisting in the Army. Thoroughly familiar with the workings of the 240mm howitzer, “the ultimate terror weapon – of the Franco-Prussian war”, he became an infantry battalion scout.

Given leave for Mothers’ Day in 1944, he arrived home to discover that his mother had committed suicide the previous night.

Three months after her funeral, Vonnegut was posted overseas and took part in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was captured.

He was detailed to work as a prisoner of war in a factory which produced vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women and, as a result, was working three storeys underground in the cellar of an abattoir called Schlachthof-funf in Dresden when, on the night of February 13 1945, three consecutive British and American bombing raids annihilated the city.

The firestorm which resulted killed around 135,000 people in two hours; Vonnegut stepped out of the cellar intact.

“And there was nothing there,” he told Mick Brown of the Telegraph magazine. “Our guards didn’t know what to do. We just started walking, through heaps of smoking rubble, single-file, following them. Then two American fighter-planes came over and machine-gunned us, just for the hell of it.”

Vonnegut had been attacked by the British, American and Russian air forces, but never the German. For several weeks he was employed as a “corpse-miner”, though many cellars were cleared simply with flamethrowers, after Vonnegut and his fellow-prisoners had been sent in to retrieve any valuables.

But though he wrote about his experience several times in addition to Slaughterhouse-Five he declared in 1983 that: “The importance of Dresden in my life has been considerably exaggerated… Dresden was astonishing, but experiences can be astonishing without changing you.”

After the war he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago News Bureau while studying Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where the thesis for his MA (on connections between Cubism and Native American uprisings of the late 19th century) was unanimously rejected – though he was awarded the degree on the publication of his fourth novel, Cat’s Cradle, on the ground of its anthropological content.

From 1947 to 1950 he worked as a publicist for General Electric in Shenectady, New York, and began to write short stories. His first novel, published as Piano Player (and later as Utopia 14), appeared in 1952 and depicted a future dystopian company town in which technology was pitted against the individual.

It was praised by readers of science fiction, as was his second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), in which a spaceman is converted into pure energy and, as a result, knows everything that ever has, or ever will happen. But he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, every 59 days, and for only an hour at a time.

Vonnegut made ends meet between sales of stories by teaching English at Hopefield High School on Cape Cod and working in advertising. An attempt to set up America’s first Saab dealership fared less well, and he went bankrupt. Mother Night (1962) was about a double agent in the Second World War, but it was Cat’s Cradle the following year which brought him a wider readership, with its account of a religion called Bokononism which peddles “harmless untruths” and a synthetic ice which eats the world.

It was much admired by Graham Greene. God Bless You, Mr Rosewater was a penetrating satire on insanity and money, and introduced an sf writer called Kilgore Trout, who served as Vonnegut’s alter ego (though he was based on Theodore Sturgeon), and made several appearances in his later work.

He was much admired by the book’s protagonist, the drunk millionaire Eliot Rosewater, who tells a group of sf writers: “I love you sons of bitches… You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future.”

Philip José Farmer later wrote a novel called Venus on the Half-Shell, in the style of Vonnegut, attributing it to Kilgore Trout. Vonnegut spent 1967 in Dresden on a Guggenheim fellowship before publishing Slaughterhouse-Five, which transformed his fortunes.

Though as science-fictional as his previous work (the hero spends half his time on the planet Tralfamadore), it received mainstream praise; it also seemed to Vonnegut a natural end to that part of his career, and few of his later books received the same critical praise.

But Breakfast of Champions (1973) was a commercial success, and Slapstick (1976); Jailbird (1979), an overtly political novel attacking McCarthyism and Watergate; Galapagos (1985), a Darwinian comedy featuring Kilgore Trout’s son, Leon Trotsky Trout; and Bluebeard (1987), about a soldier who becomes an abstract expressionist painter, all continued to demonstrate an irreverent black humour which pleased his readers.

His position as the Grand Old Man of the counterculture meant that he remained in demand as a speaker, and he produced several collections of essays and speeches.

His play Happy Birthday, Wanda Jane was filmed, but Vonnegut hated it, even though he wrote the screenplay; the film of Slaughterhouse-Five, by contrast, delighted him.

In later life he painted and drew at his house in the Hamptons or his apartment in Manhattan, though he was enraged enough by George W Bush to return to publishing (from which he had retired after Timequake) with A Man Without a Country (2006), a collection of essays.

He married, in 1945, Jane Marie Cox; they had three children and divorced in 1979; he lived with the photographer Jill Krementz, who became his second wife, from 1970. They had a daughter, and Vonnegut also brought up the three children of his sister Alice after her death.